"[This] cheered me up no end. It's about WEIRDness, how Western Educated, Industrialised, Rich & Democratic societies produce people who are in no way typical of planet as whole, yet make up bulk of respondents in social science experiments…

"…article is called "The Weirdest People in the World"… & it was published last month in BBS…authors begin by noting that psychology as a discipline is an outlier in being most American of all scientific fields. 70% of all citations in major psych journals refer to articles published by Americans. In chemistry, by contrast, figure is just 37%. This is a serious problem, because psychology varies across cultures, & chemistry doesn't."

As I embark on learning how, professionally, to talk to & work w/ people from other places it's cheering to know I don't know anything. Because if the real social sciences are biased towards Western intuitions then the pseudo-sciences of marketing are, planetarily, even more bogus than I'd always suspected."

"Schools are built for, and in the image of, the industrial revolution ... Creativity and standardised testing can't share the same bed ... The death of entrepreneurship ... What is it that needs to change? Clue: It isn't curriculum or assessment ... Fundamental change through Brains Trusts ... Making sure that our current and future students in schools and higher education establishments are capable of entrepreneurship in many areas of their lives, of coming up with solutions that marry new technology (bringing with it new possibilities we could not have before thought through) with strong understanding of design to tackle issues that really matter is the number one task to ensure that they can fully participate as citizens. Simply providing access to part of that equation is not enough: broadband for all without understanding for all, community without happenstance on a global scale, a child's creativity without understanding of the potential technology brings."

"Malcolm Gladwell’s elegant and wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective—Gladwellian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it." ...“The basic vision says how we fare in life isn’t just determined by ourselves and our character, it’s determined by a lot of other things that are beyond our control.” ... "“For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem,” Gladwell concludes. “It has a summer-vacation problem.” So how to close the gap between rich and poor students? Get rid of summer vacation in inner-city schools." ...“It’s a book that’s very much about collective and social organized change."